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Date:      Tue, 2 Sep 2003 20:48:39 -0400
From:      Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr>
To:        Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>
Cc:        chat@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Ugly Huge BSD Monster
Message-ID:  <20030903004839.GA1625@online.fr>

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I'm not trying to argue with Brett, this is for the benefit of
newcomers/lurkers who aren't familiar with Brett's agenda.

Brett Glass wrote:
[Qt]
> Actually, GPL/commercial dual licensing is a very raw deal for the
> company that's attempting to sell the commercial licenses. They've
> set themselves up to compete with a version of their own code that
> has no commercial value...

Actually, it's an excellent model.  If you want to use Qt in your own
proprietary non-GPL code, you need to buy a licence from them (and lots
of people are doing that), and at the same time they can get their code
into free linux and BSD desktops and build their brand recognition.
They're doing just fine.  If you think they'd have done better with the
BSD licence, you should perhaps start your own software company.  In
fact they would not even have considered the LGPL, since that would have
allowed linking to non-GPL projects.

The "competing with your own freeware" argument applies much more
forcefully to the BSD licence.  BSDI eventually couldn't compete with
the free BSDs and Linux, the commercial SSH company isn't doing well
against OpenSSH (some time ago they even tried to claim SSH as their
trademark and get OpenSSH to change their name).  In both these cases
they were out-competed by free descendants of their ancestral code, not
even code contemporary with their own.  Most commercial companies won't
even consider the BSD licence for new code, though if they're nice they
may contribute to projects with an existing BSD licence.  

There are good arguments for the BSD licence but they have nothing to do
with commercial benefit.  Some valid arguments are that it helps promote
open standards (a partially-broken Kerberos from Microsoft is better
than a totally rewritten incompatible version) and that, if you start
out without commercial goals but later change your mind, you can more
easily re-use your own code without worrying about others' copyrights.
This doesn't apply to Troll Tech et al, because they've had that
scenario in mind from the start and are scrupulous about others'
copyrights, while they do indeed want to prevent other people's
commercial use of their code without paying (so, no BSD licence, no
LGPL).  Another example is ghostscript: Peter Deutsch came up with the
Aladdin licence (much more restrictive than the GPL) because the GPL did
not squash every kind of commercial use: eg, it can be
aggregated/bundled on a CD-ROM with non-GPL payware and that entire
package can be sold for profit under a restrictive licence. 

- Rahul



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